NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology FY 2020

This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2020, Research Using Biological Collections. The fellowship supports research and training of the Fellow that will utilize biological collections in innovative ways. Animals living on different continents often have remarkable morphological and/or behavioral similarities.

This pattern could be explained by convergent evolution, where unrelated species independently evolved these similar traits. Researchers have often observed that frogs in different hemispheres share similar-sounding vocalizations or calls, which presents an exciting opportunity to study convergent evolution. Frog calls could have independently evolved to sound similar because of adaptation in auditory/acoustic morphology to generate calls that travel most efficiently through similarly structured habitats.

To understand call evolution, this research will employ existing natural history museum collections integrating frog call recordings, tissue samples for genomic data, and high-resolution soft-tissue CT scans of larynges, ears, and lungs from frog specimens. Studying how frogs respond to different acoustic habitats is important for conservation, as human activities and expansion have introduced new sources of noise pollution that may disturb frog populations.

The results of this research will be shared through scientific publications and all data generated will be made readily accessible to other researchers. The Fellow will mentor undergraduate and graduate students with the goal of increasing diversity and representation in science. Furthermore, this research will be adapted to outreach events at public education programs reaching K-12, adult and family visitors.

The research uses preserved specimens from existing museum collections with soft tissue DiceCT scanning to visualize and measure frog larynges and ears to collect acoustic/auditory morphology. These data will be integrated with acoustic recordings from museum digitization projects and new phylogenomic data from ~15,000 markers (exons, introns, and ultra-conserved elements) using existing tissue collections.

This study will test if convergent evolution or phylogenetic conservatism explains the global similarity of frog calls, and the acoustic/auditory morphology that may generate them among frogs found in similar habitats on different continents. Importantly, this study will address whether the convergence of vocalizations and acoustic/auditory morphology in frogs resulted from adaptation to similar habitats, leading to correlated evolution of frog communication systems.

The Fellow will receive training in CT scanning and morphological studies of new specimens; multiple layers of existing and new specimen data will be linked to learn whether adaptation to similar habitats drives the repeated evolution of similar vocalizations and the underlying morphology on a global scale.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.